Elsbeth A. Heaman, Civilization: From Enlightenment Philosophy to Canadian History (Montreal & Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press 2022)

Canada is a very civilized country. This has long been the mythology; the “peaceable kingdom” is a designer label worn proudly in the ideological dress parades of the country’s chauvinist best. Historians have often marched in this procession, proclaiming their faith and fidelity. But only a rare few have had the audacity to insist that had their kind been listened to in the corridors of power, civilization’s Canadian content would be more certain, the nation demonstratively superior.

E.A. Heaman’s Civilization is nothing if not audacious. It is a large book with a short, if bold, message. “Where ‘theory’ sees cages, history sees civilization,” declares Heaman on the last page of her account, invoking the anarchistic sensibilities of David Graeber and David Wengrow, spelled out in their The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). Liberalism and conservatism converge in Heaman’s intellectual history, the legacy of “enlightened self-interest and constitutionalism in Canada,” owing much to David Hume, shaping royal proclamations and various official, colonially sanctioned, and solicited reports of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, until, by the 1860s and Confederation, property, and the power it both conveyed and demanded triumphed over propriety, unleashing the snarling hounds of predation and plunder. This has less to do with profit, capital, capitalism, and Gustavus Myers’ history of great Canadian wealth, all of which figure in this book lightly if at all, and far more to do with the conceptualization of constitutionalism.

Intellectual history as a specific genre has the capacity to elide fundamental social fractures by designating particular ideas of indisputable importance and then reading into historical developments their undeniable influence. Heaman’s grand idea is that David Hume’s understandings of enlightened civilization, the perils of jealousy, liberal-conservative coalescence, commerce, cosmopolitanism, progress, the need for moderation, and the balance of powers constituted a theory of history that influenced not only architects of Canadian constitutionalism such as Lord Durham and the country’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, but also the pivotal document of British North America colonialism, the Royal Proclamation of 1763. As such, the Royal Proclamation, in Heaman’s often complex analysis, is posed, contradictorily, as “ground zero for settler colonialism” as well as an attempt, however elliptical, “to construct something genuinely diverse and reciprocal.” (11) My reading of Heaman’s Civilization is that it is this latter, positive reading of the Royal Proclamation that prevails, enabling a certain civilizing brush to paint much of pre-Confederation history, undeniably years of Empire’s subordination of Indigenous peoples, with the pale hues of progressive relations of understanding and enlightenment, when a more ruinous pallet of tragic shades seems more historically accurate.

In Heaman’s telling, listening to this history of civilization’s fall in the 1860s and 1870s explains the dispossessions inherent in 19th-century Canadian development, just as it can, if parsed with sufficient sophistication, unleash “the liberal purchase on a conservative order.” This is regarded as the trajectory of our modern history. Late 20th- and early 21st-century history is one that “year by year gains ground in the courts, the legislatures, and public opinion more generally, as Canadians find new ways to connect and converse, and to live well together.” (473) We are becoming civilized again, apparently, as we once were, before John A. Macdonald, Confederation, and an unlikely antiquarian, Daniel Wilson, the first Professor of History and Literature at the University of Toronto, did their bit to bring a colony of rough-edged compassion tumbling toward the abyss of settler colonialism. “Thus, did civilization become history in Canada. Indigenous chiefs and elders, artists, and historians, continued to put forward their accounts of themselves and their communities, but scholarly and political institutions had successfully made themselves strategically ignorant of those accounts.” The Indian Act and its 1876 definition of “the Indian” as outside of self-civilizing agency followed. (447–448)

It is possible, of course, to disagree. Historically, the Royal Proclamation, a short document into which too much should not be read, was unambiguous, at the very least, that Indigenous peoples were the subjects of a British king and, as such, owed whatever rights bestowed upon them as the clash of Empires unfolded to the benevolence of a distant monarchy. On the contemporary terrain of today, in which Heaman invests much hope and not a little faith, one need not see Trudeau the younger as the exemplary expression of a civilizing politics to appreciate that Pierre Poilievre and Danielle Smith convey something of the incivility of politics in our time. If civilization depends on court decisions and legislative culture, some will say, it is destined to be acutely constrained, if not doomed. As for public opinion, it is surely, as any election demonstrates and most forums suggest, divided. Among professional historians, for instance, there simply is no consensus about some of the pressing interpretive issues of our times, despite a tendency to bureaucratically proclaim broad agreement when it is all too clear that, if the patina of lowest-common denominator agreement is scraped away, no such analytic commonality exists.

Civilization’s message overreaches. Upbeat and unblemished in its faith in the liberal enlightenment’s possibilities, it rewrites a history of disorder and disappointment in a language of historicized hope. It sees in “modestly democratizing Enlightenment constitutionalism” answers to large issues of dispossession, alienation, and social conflict (12). It is refreshing to come across faith in a future that actual history, in all of its messiness, too often suggests will unfold in dispiriting ways. However reinvigorating Civilization may well be, its Canadian trajectory, embedded in the difficult and reciprocal ruts created by capitalism’s and colonialism’s rough ride through the country’s centuries of making, remains less than convincing that answers to a transformative remaking lie in grappling with the legacies of enlightenment thought. That thought and the civilizing project it envisioned remain something to consider, of course, but it may well be that they constitute part of “all the muck of ages” that Marx insisted it would be necessary to dispense with if society was to be refashioned anew. And it is difficult to imagine, in 2023, anything short of such a revolutionary project coming to grips with the historical hurt that centuries of subjugation have institutionalized, leaving entire populations debilitated and deformed, as well as resolutely dissenting, in the process.

Bryan D. Palmer

Warkworth, Ontario

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2023v92.0013.